Month: July 2010

As part of my IPv6 setup I wanted to check what support I could expect for my current hardware. This post relates the results I got by checking on each one.

Linux PC – IPv6 is supported in Linux

MacBook – IPv6 is supported in MacOS X

Windows 7 NetBook – IPv6 is supported in Windows 7

Draytek Vigor 2820N – Draytek support in Spain confirmed to plans to implement IPv6 on this box, but they have 1 IPv6 aware router so future models should hopefully have support.

HP Officejet Ro L7680 Printer – this printer has a network connection. A support request on HP’s website generated an automatic message saying my printer was no longer supported. So no chance to even say: no we won’t support IPv6 on this printer but newer ones might include IPv6 support.

LinkSys SPA941 IP phone – very small devices so I’m guessing this won’t happen, even though LinkSys is now part of Cisco

LinkSys SPA3102 PSTN connector – see above

LinkSys PAP2T – see above

Siemens C470IP

Thecus N5200 PRO – opened support ticket, waiting for response. This should be easy as inside this box runs Linux.

D-Link DES3010F managed switch – no support, but dlink does have other managed switches which do support IPv6. This would be necessary if I wanted to do VoIP over IPv6. The current switch does not allow me to configure QoS which has been important for my VoIP setup. Maybe I’ll need to upgrade.

The clear result of this is that while PCs support IPv6 most consumer grade devices do not and I guess until there is a demand for this it’s unlikely to change.

It would be nice to have support for IPv6 on my devices as until that time if I want to connect to them when using IPv6 I’ll need to setup some sort of proxy arrangement. For a printer that is probably easy, but for something like NFS (which I use my Thecus for) I’m not sure that’s so easy. Also for my VoIP devices I’ll have to see if Asterisk or FreeSwitch support VoIP over IPv6 and if they do they can be configured to act as a gateway. However until I have a single IPv6 enabled VoIP device the gateway won’t be necessary.

In order to use IPv6 you probably need to setup things so that your sites can be reached over IPv6. I manage my own DNS server for my domain so decided to make my DNS server reachable over IPv6. This did not sound too complicated.

This required 2 things:

Ensure that Bind 9 was configured to receive and respond to queries on this address

Tell my registrar about the IPv6 address of my domain

I checked my DNS software, Bind (v9), and it did not seem to be responding to DNS requests to the IPv6 address. A quick look around indicated that I had to add an extra block in the options section of named.conf

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options{

directory"/etc/named";

// required to listen for ipv6 queries

listen-on-v6{any;};

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....

My registrar is gkg.net and I’ve been using them for a long time without trouble. So I went to their configuration page and saw that I could add another ip address for my name server. So here I added my IPv6 address. The software did not complain and I shortly found that querying the .org name servers I could see my AAAA record had been added.

When originally looking around to find out how to connect to a IPv6 network there seem to be quite a few different options and providers.

I originally requested an allocation with Hurricane Electric but had trouble setting up the tunnel. Their web page said they could not ping my public IP address (my router) and this prevented them allowing the tunnel to be created. My ADSL router does not have any ICMP filters configured and as the public IP address is forwarded to my Linux PC I knew that did not either. I also remember when setting up my ADSL connection with Jazztel that I had some configuration issues, and this turned out to be related to the fact (from what I remember) that Jazztel block ICMP traffic to the customer’s IP address. So with this problem I looked to see if I could find another tunnel broker.

I’m currently using ipv6tf.org and a tunnel end point that is local in Madrid, hosted it seems by Neo-Sky. The instructions for setting up the tunnel worked pretty much as expected with one minor detail. As my PC is NATed behind my ADSL router the creation of the sit tunnel requires the local address to be specified as the RFC1918 address and not my public IP address.

When creating the IPv6 address allocation the ipv6tf.org page sends you a confirmation with the configuration details depending on your hardware but does not show this on the web page itself. So if you incorrectly provide the OS / setup, it sends you the wrong information. I’d much rather there were an additional page for each allocation with show me my config, and then based on you specifying the hardware setup.

The configuration script that I’m currently using is not using the standard OS mechanism so I still need to see how to adjust this to fit in with RedHat’s configuration files. This is cleaner, and something I still need to do.

Other the last few years I’ve read quite a lot about IPv6 but not really done a lot about it. The theory is easy but when you actually look to try to set it up you suddenly find that most hardware does not really support it.

My Draytek 2820n ADSL router does not support IPv6. Draytek seem to be just starting to look at this in their Vigor 2130 series, but my ADSL router is not covered.

My Thecus N5200 Pro NAS device does run Linux underneath so it can be configured to support IPv6. I’ve recently upgraded to firmware version 2.00.18.4 dated 2010.06.15, and have logged into the box. It seems the kernel is not built with IPv6 support. I’ve made a support ticket requesting that IPv6 support is added. Let’s see what they say.

None of my 4 VoIP devices (Linksys SPA3102, SPA941, PAP2T, Siemens C470IP) support IPv6, though given the extra overhead of IPv6 while you need to tunnel it performance may not be very good.

My D-Link DES3010F managed switch has options for managing traffic priorities based on QoS. I need this for the VoIp quality to be decent as I’ve mentioned before. Again this only works for IPv4. So if I really wanted to do VoIP on ip6 I’d be back to square 1. Newer DLINK switches do appear to support IPv6, so maybe at some point I’ll have to consider upgrading.

My HP Officejet Pro L7680 printer has an ethernet adaptor but does not support IPv6. I’ll also ask HP about this.

My Linux box of course supports IPv6 so that is good.

My MacBook also supports IPv6. Again that is useful.

So for the moment I have done little more than setup an IPv6 tunnel and configure apache so that if you want to read this using IPv6 you can do so using http://blog6.wl0.org. Of course you won’t see any difference but this name only runs on an IPv6 address. I’ll have to check my logs to see if there are many accesses over IPv6. If you get unable to connect type errors it’s likely you are trying to connect from an IPv4 based host. If you really think you are using IPv6 and this does not work please let me know.

I’ll have to see how I can bring other services up and running under IPv6 and will let you know how I get on.